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She dug her nails into his flesh and gave one last, agonising cry, the nurse lifting a pink and red baby with a shock of dark hair into the air, wiping her quickly with a towel and hitting her on the back until a robust cry emerged into the room.
Tears filled Leonidas’s eyes, emotions swirling through him. He looked down at Hannah and she was sobbing, but a smile was on her lips as she held her hands out for their daughter, pulling her to her chest. Leonidas had never seen anything more beautiful, more perfect.
They were his family—they were his.
* * *
‘You didn’t have to come.’ Hannah had recovered enough from the delivery to be trying to make sense of what Leonidas was doing at the hospital—and how he’d got there so quickly. Seeing Leonidas again was going to take a lot more recovery time. It had been three months. Twelve weeks. So many nights wondering if she’d done completely the wrong thing, wanting to crumble and beg him to take her back, needing him on every level, loving him enough to take whatever crumbs he would give her.
And in this moment, when her hormones were rioting and she was looking at their beautiful daughter, it took all her wherewithal to remember why she’d left him.
To remember that he didn’t love her, didn’t want her, that his heart belonged to someone else and always would.
He’d mercifully left the room again after the delivery under threat of the police being called, so Hannah could be cleaned up in privacy and transferred to a different room—one that was smaller and less medical in its design.
She was exhausted, but her heart was bursting—their daughter was asleep in a tiny crib across the room.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’
She shook her head.
‘Did you really want to keep me from this?’
She swallowed, looking at him and seeing him almost for the first time. He was so handsome but there was a torment in his face that robbed her of breath.
‘I was going to let you know once she was born.’
That her statement had hurt him was obvious, but when he spoke it was quietly, gently, and that somehow hurt even more.
‘No doubt.’
He paced across the room and Hannah’s eyes followed him hungrily before she realised what she was doing and looked away. A nurse had brought a tea in a few moments earlier, before Leonidas had returned. Hannah reached for it now, cupping the mug in her hands gratefully.
‘You were in so much pain,’ he said slowly, turning to face her, his eyes roaming over her in the same hungry way she’d been looking at him a moment earlier. ‘I thought you were dying.’
‘So did I, believe me,’ she quipped, but without humour. She sipped her tea then held it in her lap.
Leonidas moved to the crib, staring down at their daughter, and Hannah had to look away—so powerful was the image of the father of her daughter, the man she loved, the pride on his face, the love she saw there...it tore her apart.
Tears filled her eyes and she blinked, sipping her tea again, jerking her head away so she was looking at a shining white wall.
‘Three months.’ He said the words as though they were being dragged from deep within him. ‘You’ve been gone for three months.’
The tone of his voice had her pulling her face back to him, and she saw pain there, disbelief. Hurt.
‘Three months and it has felt like a decade.’ He swallowed, his Adam’s apple jerking in his throat.
Her own grief was washing over her. ‘I had to leave.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Because you love me.’
She swept her eyes shut. ‘Yes.’ There was no sense denying it. True love didn’t disappear on a whim. It was
love. Simple, desperate, all-consuming love.
‘Theos, Hannah.’ He moved towards the bed and she stiffened, bracing for his nearness. She’d come on in leaps and bounds, was learning how to live without him, but she wasn’t ready to be touched by him. She couldn’t.
‘You don’t have to be here,’ she said urgently, arresting his progress across the room. ‘You really don’t.’
